Editorial

Two essays by early career teachers open this issue. Lewis Goodacre and Anna Warbrick speak back to the neoliberal discourses that exert such a shaping influence on schooling in general and English in particular, through high-stakes testing and the imposition of top-down models of curriculum and pedagogy. Their resistance is enacted in narrative: they tell stories of individual students that illuminate the stifling reductivity of the myths of linear progress and easily measurable learning. At the same time, these stories represent the tellers’ commitment to alternative ways of being a teacher – a commitment to forms of pedagogy that are attentive to the needs and interests of learners, and thus, inevitably, to the different needs and interests of different learners. Rhiannon O’Grady, Daniel Cassany and Janine Knight report on two projects at a school in Catalunya, where students created podcasts in response to Of Mice and Men and The Crucible. They show how the podcasting enabled students to adopt roles, to bring their own cultural knowledge to the interpretation of the texts and to develop their own critical readings. Contrasting podcasting with the constraints of essay-writing, they emphasise the collaborative and interactive nature of the podcasts, as well as the value of work in relatively informal registers of language. A similar commitment to dialogic and reflexive practice informs the paper by Loraine Prinsloo-Marcus and Bridget Campbell. Presented in the form of a conversation between the two authors, who work in the same culturally diverse South African university, it asks what they have learned from their investigation into their own language histories alongside the language histories of their students. Questions about the status and value of English as a language and as a curricular entity are also explored by Ningyang Chen and Chenyang Gu. They consider social media responses to a recent proposal that English should cease to be a core subject within the Chinese education system and what they reveal about students’ experiences of and attitudes to English. Their analysis also touches on wider concerns regarding the growth of a neijuan culture of intense competition and the threat that this poses to suzhi education – education that is focused not on test scores but on the holistic development of human beings. In this moment of environmental crisis, however, there is a need to re-examine what we might understand by human flourishing as the aim of education – and to ask whether such an aim is sufficient. Through his critical posthumanist reading of John Wyndham’s The Chrysalids, Adrian Downey opens up these questions, arguing for a reconceptualisation of justice, democracy and agency, in recognition of the limitations of established anthropocentric ways of seeing. Issues of agency are, likewise, foregrounded in Michael CHANGING ENGLISH 2023, VOL. 30, NO. 1, 1–2 https://doi.org/10.1080/1358684X.2023.2166215